


Word of Recall

by WretchedArtifact



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, First Kiss, Huddling For Warmth, Pining, Snowed In
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-07
Updated: 2020-12-07
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:55:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27741091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WretchedArtifact/pseuds/WretchedArtifact
Summary: Deep in the ruins of Eiselcross, when it's clear that the Mighty Nein aren't going to survive the battle they're in, Caduceus and Jester both castWord of Recall. Jester's version of the spell is supposed to take her to her childhood bedroom in Nicodranas, the site of the very first shrine to the Traveler that ever existed.Instead, Jester wakes up alongside Caleb in the freezing darkness of another Aeorian ruin: badly injured, exhausted, and with an emptiness in her head where the Traveler's magic used to be.
Relationships: Jester Lavorre/Caleb Widogast
Comments: 14
Kudos: 134
Collections: Heart Attack Exchange 2020





	Word of Recall

**Author's Note:**

  * For [infernal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/infernal/gifts).



> Note: Spoilers through C2E116, 'Under Timeless Ice.'

Jester woke up to flickers of silver light dancing in front of her eyes.

They made her feel oddly nostalgic. She used to get those flickers when she was a little girl, after she spent a long day in her room with her head buried in a book. She’d look up, and blink at the sunset light coming through the window, and her field of vision would temporarily fill with cascading bits of silver as her eyes tried to adjust back to looking at the real world. They were pretty to watch, even if they only lasted for a few seconds.

But these flickers of silver kept going. Her eyes couldn’t seem to focus on anything, and her head ached miserably. Where was she?

“Jester?”

She tilted her head toward the sound of the voice. Beyond the flickers, she could only see darkness, and then the faint, dim shape of Caleb’s face, leaning over her. “Caleb?” Jester said, her voice coming out much quieter and rustier than she was expecting.

 _“Ja_ , I’m here,” he said. She felt a hand squeeze hers tightly. “How are you feeling?”

She tried to shift, instinctively, and pain scorched down her spine. _“Ow_ ,” she said.

“Try not to move,” Caleb said. “You’re in pretty bad shape.”

Jester squeezed her eyes shut. The silver flickers were starting to fade, but now she was acutely aware of a burning pain in her tailbone, and in her shoulders, and in her knees, and in basically every part of her body she turned her attention towards. There was a funny taste in her mouth, too. When she pressed her lips together, she felt them catch stickily against each other before parting. “My mouth’s wet,” she said. Then, trying to make her rusty voice sound light: “Did you kiss me, Caleb?”

She heard Caleb’s quiet huff. “I very clumsily poured a healing potion into your mouth.”

Oh. She must’ve been unconscious, for him to do that. “What happened?” she asked. “I don’t remember.”

“We were fighting,” Caleb said. “And losing, pretty badly. I didn’t have the spell to get us out of there, so you and Caduceus—”

Oh, that’s right. The memory elbowed its way into her aching head: the seven of them, deep in one of Eiselcross’s underground ruins, attacked on all sides by creatures that just _kept coming._ She and Caleb were stuck on the far end of the chamber, hemmed in by slime monsters, while on the other side of the room, the rest of the party was huddled in a defensive clump as the tide of battle turned against them. Beau was bloodied and exhausted; Veth was firing her crossbow from the ground, too wounded to stand; and even Yasha was starting to falter, blood pouring down her face from a large gash on her forehead.

Then Jester saw Fjord take a blow so ferocious he dropped to his knees, swaying limply, barely clinging to consciousness. And Caduceus had shouted across the room to Jester, his voice tight with distress:

_“Word of Recall! You take Caleb, I’ll get the rest!”_

And with that, the five of them were gone: vanished in an instant, swallowed up by a shimmer of green energy. For a second, fear gripped Jester’s heart so painfully that she froze—because all she could think of was the den of the blue dragon, the way everyone else had left her behind.

But she wasn’t alone this time. Caleb had rushed to her side, tucking his arm tightly through hers. “I don’t know how this works, but let’s give it a shot,” he said.

So she cast it. The spell was supposed to take them back to her bedroom in Nicodranas, the site of the very first shrine to the Traveler that ever existed. But this dark, cold place was definitely not Nicodranas.

Jester opened her eyes again and looked up at Caleb. His face slowly, hazily came into focus: dirty, bloodied, and full of pained concern for her. “Where are we?” Jester asked.

“I’m not sure,” Caleb said. “It’s too dark for me to see anything. But we’re indoors, and it’s still very cold. I think we might still be in Eiselcross.”

Jester could see better in the dark than Caleb, but she couldn’t see much of anything from where she was lying on the ground. “Help me up,” she said.

For a second, Caleb looked like he wanted to argue, but when she gripped his hand and pulled against him for leverage, he let her. She made it about halfway up before a surge of pain made her gasp, and Caleb put his arm around her back and helped her up the rest of the way. “Do you want me to hold on to you?” he asked.

“Yes, please,” Jester said through clenched teeth.

Caleb shifted closer to her, letting her lean her weight against his side. Jester looked around the room they were in. It looked a lot like the ruin they had just left: cracked stone walls patterned with arcane glyphs, the ground littered with piles of rubble that had probably once been statues or archways or columns. The room was big, but not cavernous, and about twenty feet away, Jester could see swirling eddies of snow blowing into the chamber through a dark, barrel-sized hole in the wall.

“We’re definitely still in Eiselcross,” Jester said. “The walls have those artsy magic symbols on them, and there’s snow coming in through the wall over there. “

Caleb said quietly, “Are there any... _things_ in the room with us?”

Jester looked around creakily, her neck aching, but she didn’t see any sign of life. “I don’t think so,” she said.

Caleb shifted again, pulling her in a little closer, so more of her back was braced against his chest. Being held like that would’ve been really nice, under different circumstances. “Jester, I need you to try something,” Caleb said. His voice was low and urgent. “You can make simple sounds using magic, yeah?”

“Of course.”

“Could you try to make a sound of some kind?” he asked. “Something quiet, that only we can hear. Something that won’t attract attention.”

It was kind of a weird request, but Thaumaturgy was the easiest spell Jester knew. She aimed her attention a few feet to the left and thought about hushed whispers, the kind of whispers the audience always made before one of her Mama’s shows. She murmured the short incantation and threw the sound at the spot.

Nothing happened.

Jester frowned. Thaumaturgy was one of the first spells the Traveler had taught her, and she’d done it so many times that casting it was pure muscle memory. She tried again, more deliberately. She let her head fill with the sound of whispers; she murmured the incantation; she aimed the fizzy, intangible magic at the spot she wanted the whispers to come from.

Nothing happened.

The Traveler’s magic—which was _always_ present, even when he wasn’t—had completely vanished from the air around her.

Her heart lurched in her chest, and she felt an iciness colder than Eiselcross start to crawl up her spine. “Caleb, it’s not working!” Jester said, her voice rising with panic.

“Okay,” Caleb said, his voice strained. His arms tightened around her, and this time it felt less like he was holding her up and more like he was hugging her. “I think there’s something affecting our magic, for the moment. I can’t cast anything, either.”

 _No magic._ They were still in Eiselcross, separated from their friends, and they had _no magic._ “What are we going to do?” Jester said, adrenaline spiking hard through her already-exhausted veins.

“Maybe we should just...wait a few minutes,” Caleb said. “It could be a side effect of the spell going wrong. If we take a moment to rest, maybe what’s blocking our magic will fade.”

His voice sounded just reasonable enough that it blunted the sharp edge of Jester’s panic. Neither of them knew how Eiselcross’s magical interference worked—maybe their missing magic just needed a second to catch up, or something. “Okay,” she said. “Okay. But we should move against a wall or hide behind one of those piles of junk. I don’t like that there’s a big hole in the wall that monsters could come through.”

“Which wall is it on?” Caleb asked. “I still can’t see anything.”

She pointed. Caleb leaned forward in that direction, like the few extra inches would help, then sighed. “I suppose I could send out the driftglobe,” he said. “But it’s very bright. If there’s a hole to the outside, it might draw something’s attention.”

“You have a celebone, don’t you?” Jester asked. “That’s bright enough that you could see to the wall, at least.”

She felt him shift, rummaging through his things, until he produced the arcane cylinder. He huffed with amusement. “One of these days, we’ll remember to bring a torch on these expeditions, like practical people,” he said.

He activated the celebone. The dark chamber around them suddenly glowed with riotous, colorful light, a mesmerizing kaleidoscope of reds and purples, yellows and oranges, greens and blues. It was almost pretty enough to soften the hard knot of worry in Jester’s stomach. “Well, that’s a good sign, at least,” Caleb said. “Our things work, even if we don’t.”

He swung the glowing cylinder toward the wall. The celebone’s short radius of light just barely illuminated the edges of the hole leading outside. “Okay, I see what you mean,” Caleb said. “That does look big enough for something to squeeze through.” He looked around. “How about we camp out behind that pile over there? It’s tall enough that we won’t be visible.”

He pointed at a big heap of rubble about thirty feet away. Jester thought about her aching spine and wondered if she could make it all the way there without collapsing. “Okay,” she said. “But you might have to drag me there like a sack of potatoes.”

Caleb carefully extracted himself from her leaning weight and stood up. He winced when he straightened his left leg, and Jester saw that his trousers were stained with blood from the knee down. “Oh, Caleb, you’re really hurt too!” Jester exclaimed.

“Eh,” Caleb said with grim cheerfulness. “I’ll be okay. You’re the one who took the brunt of the backfiring magic. It knocked you out cold.”

“Well, you’re welcome,” Jester said.

It made the edge of Caleb’s mouth tick upward. Even under bad circumstances, Jester liked being able to make Caleb smile. “Let’s see if you can walk before I just start dragging you around,” he said.

It was slow and painful, but Jester eventually made it to her feet with Caleb’s help. They started limping toward the large pile of rubble across the room, and Jester tried not to lean as heavily on Caleb as she wanted to. “Hopefully this doesn’t attract any party-loving wolves,” Caleb said, his face lit from underneath with the celebone’s swirling color. 

Jester imagined a pack of sleek white wolves streaking through the hole in the wall, ready to tear them to pieces, and felt her stomach sink. “We’d die so fast,” she said. “Do you have any, you know, weapons? Like weapon-weapons?”

“I have a dagger.”

Jester waited for him to continue, but he didn’t. “Like, _a_ dagger?” Jester said. “Just one?”

“Do you really think I’d do any better with two?”

He had a point. “I only have my axe,” Jester said.

“Well, then we’re all set,” Caleb said bracingly. “I’ve seen what you can do to people with that thing.”

“Yeah, to _people_ ,” Jester said. “Not _wolves_.”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the edge of Caleb’s mouth tick up again, and his arm around her squeezed a little tighter. “Halfway there,” he said.

When they finally inched their way over to the pile of rubble, Caleb turned off the celebone and helped her settle down on the ground. Jester couldn’t put up a tough front anymore: she hurt so badly that all she could do was curl up on her side, her knees instinctively pulling up toward her chest. “Can you help me take off my haversack?” she asked.

Caleb carefully unthreaded her arms from its straps, and then, without asking, tucked it under her head as a makeshift pillow. He’d seen her do it a thousand times when they camped outside. Jester closed her eyes, waves of dark red pain washing through her, and she couldn’t help herself: she touched her chest and reached internally for the Traveler’s magic again. Nothing big—just a teeny, tiny healing spell to take the edge off the pain.

Nothing happened.

She let her hand fall to her side with a sigh. When she opened her eyes again, she saw Caleb was still looking at her, that expression of pained concern still on his face. “Caleb, what do you think happened to everyone else?” she asked. “Do you think they made it to Nicodranas?”

She was hoping he would say he was sure they’d made it, full of clear confidence. But instead Caleb was quiet for so long that Jester’s already knotted stomach somehow managed to knot itself even tighter. “I don’t know,” Caleb said at last. “When they disappeared, it looked like the spell worked...smoothly. But I don’t know.”

Now Jester imagined the rest of the Nein lying in the snow in Eiselcross somewhere: magic-less, cold, and bleeding out. Dread swelled up inside her, more painful than any of her cuts or bruises. “Shit,” she said. “They were hurt so badly when they left. Fjord looked like he was going to pass out. What if the spell backfired and knocked him out too?”

“Well, I wouldn’t be too worried about Fjord,” Caleb said. “If he passes out, he pops back up again, yeah? It’s that half-orc thing he has.”

That’s right—she had forgotten about that. The knot in her stomach loosened the tiniest bit. “And they have healing potions, right?” she said. “Even if a few of them got knocked out, they could still revive everyone.”

“Definitely,” Caleb said. “And _they_ all have weapon-weapons. If they’re still in Eiselcross, they’ll be able to put up a fight.”

Jester clung to that little bit of confidence in his voice. “Yeah,” she said. “Or maybe Caduceus’s spell _did_ work, and that’s why mine didn’t! There was only enough magic for one, and he used it all up.”

“Yeah,” Caleb said. “Could be.”

The two of them looked at each other. Jester knew, deep down, that they were mostly just trying to make each other feel better; she could see the doubt underneath the encouraging lift of Caleb’s lips. But she had to have hope. She _had_ to. If she didn’t...

“Well,” Caleb said. “I think you should rest a bit, while we’re waiting. I can keep watch.”

Jester was so wiped out that she knew she shouldn’t argue. But: “You can’t even see anything in here,” Jester said.

“I’ll listen very carefully,” Caleb said. “And I’ll wake you up instantly if I suspect something else is in here.”

Jester nodded. “Do you want to hold onto my axe, just in case?”

Caleb hesitated. “That’s probably not a bad idea,” he said at last. “I also wouldn’t say no to that hand-warmer you have, unless you wanted to use it.”

Poor Caleb got cold so easily. And now he couldn’t even make fire to warm himself up. “Of course you can use it,” Jester said, her heart full of pity.

He helped her locate both the axe and the hand-warmer among her gear, and he held the metal rod to his chest the way Jester had showed him before. “If something leaps out at you from the darkness, make sure you hit them with the axe, not the rod,” Jester said. “Otherwise all you’ll do is burn them a little.”

“I’ll do my best,” Caleb said. “And if I do use the axe, I’ll make sure to aim for the head.”

Oh, he was teasing her. Even under bad circumstances, Jester liked it when Caleb joked around with her. “Jeez,” Jester said, pulling her cloak around herself more tightly. “You hit one guy in the head with an axe, and suddenly it becomes this big _thing_.”

She kept her eyes open just long enough to confirm the lift of Caleb’s mouth in response—a small smile on his dirty, bloodied face. Then she closed her eyes, bobbed up and down on the back of a few more waves of pain, and dropped off into unconsciousness.

...

The room was a little brighter when Jester woke up again. She opened her eyes and saw Caleb was still sitting next to her, cross-legged, with an open book balanced on his knee. He was squinting at it in the low light, making an idle, repetitive motion with one hand. Jester had seen him make that gesture before: a sweep of his thumb across the pads of his fingers, like a match striking a hard surface. Normally when he did that, fire would flow from his thumb and gather into a ball in his cupped palm.

But nothing was happening now. Jester’s sleep-softened mind took the realization painfully. She knew producing fire was usually as simple to Caleb as Thaumaturgy was to her.

Then she saw the shape of Caleb’s hand shift; he snapped quietly and pointed his finger at the ground next to him. Oh no, that was even _worse—_ it was his gesture to summon Frumpkin. The thought of Caleb not being able to call Frumpkin to him was so terrible that Jester reached out sleepily and clasped Caleb’s hand.

“Oh,” he said, surprised. For a second, his hand stayed flat in her grasp, but then he curled his fingers around hers. “I didn’t know you were awake.”

“Your magic’s still not working?” Jester asked.

“Not yet.” He squeezed her hand gently. “It’s only been an hour and a half, though. I was thinking, maybe it needs a full night’s rest to come back.”

Jester lifted her head creakily and looked around the chamber they were in. “Do you think something in this room could be blocking us?” she asked. “We could try going outside.”

“We’re still in pretty rough shape. We should probably heal up a bit more before risking it.”

Jester knew he was right: she still felt extremely shitty, even if the pain wasn’t quite as acute as it had been before. “I hate this,” she said grumpily. “I mean, I like the part where we’re alive, but being alive without magic _sucks._ _”_

Caleb looked down at the empty patch of ground beside him, where he had snapped and pointed. “It’s pretty bad, yeah,” he said quietly.

Jester squeezed his hand. “I’m sorry you can’t have Frumpkin with you,” she said. “If you want, you can have—”

Then she froze with sudden realization. “Oh shit!” she exclaimed. “Sprinkle!”

She let go of Caleb’s hand and shoved her hands underneath her cloak, underneath her armor, to the little pocket of space where she had thrust her pet weasel before the fight started. Her hands met warm fur, and then she heard a _squeak_ and felt sharp teeth bite her finger.

“Sprinkle!” she sang, full of relief, and extracted him from her armor. The crimson weasel twisted grumpily in her hands as she brought him into the cold air. “Look at you, you’re fine!” She dropped a kiss on top of his head and then swung her hands away before he could bite her face. “You were just taking a little nap with me, yeah?” She swung him toward Caleb. “Do you want to hold him?”

Caleb leaned back a little. “Ah,” he said. “I’m...good...for now.”

“Oh, you must be so hungry,” Jester said to Sprinkle, and checked her pockets for any crumbled bits of food that might still be there. She found a few scraps of Dagen’s wolf bacon that she had set aside expressly for this purpose, and held them out on the flats of her fingers. Sprinkle snatched them up and started gnawing, still grumpy.

“Speaking of food,” Caleb said. “I did a little inventorying while you were asleep. By my rough calculation, we have enough beads of nourishment to last us a year and a half.”

“Oh, good,” Jester said. “So there’s no rush to go home.”

“I also remembered that my boots do a little bit of damage if I use them to fly,” Caleb said. “So, assuming their magic still works, that’s _two_ things I currently have on my person that will actually damage an enemy.”

“That’s pretty sad, Caleb,” Jester said. “Maybe we should get you, like, a shortsword, or a crossbow, or something, when we finally get back home.”

“I’ll put it on the list with _a torch_ and _a tinderbox_ ,” Caleb said ruefully.

Jester was pretty sure she didn’t have a tinderbox, either. Beau did, but...well. “Okay, I’m going to try to sit up,” Jester said.

She carefully tucked Sprinkle back into her armor so he could finish his bacon in peace. Then she shifted and pressed one hand flat against the ground. Her spine still ached, but this time she managed to push herself up into a seated position without grabbing onto the hand Caleb was holding out uncertainly nearby.

But once she was upright and had proved that she could do it herself, she reached out and grabbed Caleb’s hand anyway. Holding onto him made her feel better. He looked surprised again, and while the room was dark enough that she could’ve been mistaken, it almost looked like his face shaded into a blush. But he didn’t let go, just carefully curled his fingers around hers, the way he had before.

“Good,” he said, his voice soft. “You seem to be on the mend.”

Jester looked at his blood-stained trouser leg, now dark and dried. “Do you want me to look at your leg?” Jester asked. “I have my healer’s kit. I could wrap it up.”

He hesitated. “I’m not thrilled about the idea of exposing it to the cold air.”

“It’ll be warmer once you put another layer around it.”

He couldn’t really argue with that. He set his book aside and gingerly rolled up his trouser leg, exposing a long, nasty-looking gash in the side of his calf. “Aw, poor Caleb,” Jester said, taking out her kit. “Should I clean up some of the blood first?”

“With what?”

Jester gave him a weird look. “Water.”

“You want to pour ice-cold water on my wounded leg while we’re sitting in the middle of this frozen hellscape?”

“Oh my God, you’re such a _baby_ , Caleb,” Jester said. She reached for her canteen. “I will _dab_ cold water on your wounded leg _gently_ , while you hold onto the hand-warmer.”

The unhappy grimace that Caleb made was almost cute in how over-the-top it was. “ _Ja,_ all right,” he said, preemptively gritting his teeth.

So Jester wetted a cloth and very, very gently started to clean away the dried blood around the wound. Caleb hugged the hand-warmer to his chest and braced himself against the pain, lines of tension visible on his face and neck. “I think you should take a nap too, after this,” Jester said. “I can keep watch and go through all my stuff. I haven’t cleaned out my haversack in a while, maybe there are some cool things in there that I’ve forgotten about.”

“I am feeling pretty run down,” Caleb admitted. “Maybe just for an hour or two.”

Once she had cleaned up as much of the blood as she could, she carefully wrapped Caleb’s calf in bandages and pulled his pant leg back down. She saw him flex his foot experimentally. “That does feel a little better,” he said. “And my leg will probably feel warmer, once it unthaws.”

Jester rolled her eyes. “All right, lie down and go to sleep,” she ordered.

Caleb passed over her axe first, since she was taking watch. Now that the dawn light was starting to illuminate the chamber a little more, she could see a faint bloodstain on the blade from where she had lopped off a corpse’s head earlier in the day. Hopefully Caleb’s bad eyesight meant he hadn’t noticed it. “I’m keeping this, though,” Caleb said, still hugging the hand-warmer.

“Of course,” Jester said airily. “I would never stop you from shnuggling with a big rod, Caleb.”

To her amusement, it made Caleb blush: she could see it even in the low light. He slid awkwardly down onto his side on the ground, undoing part of his scarf and bunching it under his head as a pillow. He was facing her, but then he seemed to think better of it and rolled onto his other side.

“Hey!” Jester said, offended.

“You’re going to be sitting there for a long time with nothing to do,” he said. “You’re going to be tempted to draw dicks on my face if you’re staring at it for that long.”

“Not _dicks_ ,” Jester said. “Just maybe a little moustache, and a goatee, and a monocle—”

Caleb drew his coat tighter around him and pulled the hand-warmer into an awkward embrace. “Good night, Jester.”

Jester, feeling a teeny bit scorned, reached out and very solicitously tucked Caleb’s scarf more closely around his neck and ears. “Good night, Caleb,” Jester said.

It didn’t take him too long to fall asleep—Jester could tell he was out by the slightly raspier sound of his breathing. The sound sent an unexpected wave of loneliness through her. Jester was very good at finding things to occupy her time when she was alone; she had a lifetime’s worth of practice in it. But she hadn’t needed to exercise those skills very much since she met the Mighty Nein. While there were downsides to spending basically 24 hours a day in the company of six other people, at least it meant there was always someone for her to talk to. And on the rare occasions when the rest of the Nein were all asleep at the same time, there had always been the Traveler.

Thinking of the Traveler put a pit in Jester’s stomach. She glanced down at Caleb, reassuring herself that he was still asleep, and then cast her eyes up at the ceiling of the chamber. “Artie?” she whispered to the air.

There was no response.

Nope, she didn’t like that at all. It had hurt her, before, when the Traveler was too busy with his other followers to listen to her. But most of his followers were off bothering the Moonweaver now, and that meant Artie had plenty of time to listen to her. He just couldn’t hear her right now, for some reason. Right? That had to be what it was. He wanted to listen to her, but something about stupid Eiselcross was keeping the two of them apart. 

She felt a tiny lump start to form in her throat. She shook her head determinedly and reached into her bag for her sketchbook. She had to keep her spirits up; getting sad wouldn’t help. Back when the Traveler was busier, she would keep him up-to-date about what was happening in her life by drawing it, so that’s what she’d do now. She’d draw what happened.

The last picture in her book was of the inside of Caleb’s tower, when they had invited those Yeti to spend the night with them. She had drawn all the Yeti lying down on the ground, fast asleep, while in the corner Caleb read to them from a storybook. She’d put a little speech bubble coming from his mouth with the word _“Katze”_ inside it. Not because he had read about cats—she had no fucking idea what he’d read about, because he insisted on reading the book in the original Zemnian to bore the Yeti to sleep—but because _Katze_ was the shortest Zemnian word she knew how to spell, after seeing it pass by on so many pages of _The Cat Prince._

She flipped back a few pages in her sketchbook. She’d drawn quite a few Caleb pictures recently—him reading to her in his room, him stomping around in the snow trying to get that big cursed emerald out of a pillar. She’d made him look funny in the picture with the cursed emerald, because he’d looked _really_ funny in real life, all beat to shit and mad about it. But she’d also captured his handsomeness very well in the other picture, the one where he was sitting next to her on the couch. She’d gotten the little cleft in his chin, and the small smile on his mouth, and the nice line of his jaw. He looked almost happy.

Jester flipped forward to a fresh page and took out her art supplies. She angled the book toward the dim light coming through the hole in the wall and started to draw. Not one picture, but lots of little tableaux. Her chopping off that one dude’s head with her axe, while Fjord stood next to her looking gobsmacked. Caduceus fighting off those weird, glowy elemental things. Veth plummeting into darkness, the edges of her pink coat fluttering. Beau and Yasha fighting back to back, covered in blood, but in a really cool and pretty and artistic-looking way.

But when she thought about what to draw next, her pencil hesitated above the paper. She could draw her and Caleb with their arms linked as she cast _Word of Recall._ She could draw herself lying on the ground, dramatically unconscious, while Caleb cupped her face and poured a healing potion into her mouth. She could draw Caleb helping her sit up—or holding her against his chest—or helping her walk across the room with his arm around her waist, a look of soft concern on his bloodied, handsome face.

But for some reason, deep-down, she didn’t want to draw those things. She couldn’t really explain why. She looked up again, scanning the chamber around her, looking for a hint of the Traveler’s presence. She touched her chest, reaching for his healing magic. Nothing.

Artie wasn’t here. He hadn’t seen all those nice things Caleb had done for her. And for some reason, weirdly, she kind of didn’t want him to know.

She flipped to a new page in her sketchbook and started a fresh picture. It was a two-page spread, a full scene this time, different elements pieced together from imagination and memory. She drew Veth and Yeza’s apartment in Nicodranas, the one that had been designed for halflings, and that the rest of the Nein had basically filled to bursting when they visited. She drew Veth hugging Yeza, and Yasha carrying a laughing Luc on her shoulders, and Caduceus cooking something in the small kitchen. She drew the window on the wall a little bigger than it really was, and through it she drew the wavy line of the ocean and the sandy dunes of the beach. She drew a tiny Beau and a tiny Fjord out there, doing one of their workouts together—Beau posing awesomely, because she was super-good at them, and Fjord posing a little awkwardly, because he still kind of sucked.

That was where she wanted them to be right now. Not huddled in another Aeorian ruin, half-dead, half-frozen, but waiting for her and Caleb in Nicodranas. And when she and Caleb got back, everyone would laugh, and hug them, and be so happy and relieved that everything turned out all right.

Not that things _would_ be all right, at that point. Being back in Nicodranas would mean they couldn’t track what Molly—what _Lucien_ was doing. And they still had Vess deRogna’s dead body locked up in Caleb’s necklace. And Dagen would’ve assumed they all died, and when he got back to Balenpost he’d probably tell everybody there, and then the rest of the Cerberus Assembly would probably try to figure out what was going on, and then—

Jester inhaled sharply, clutching her pencil tight. No. She couldn’t think about any of that. She needed to stay positive. She was very good at staying positive, if she worked at it.

Sometimes she just—slipped a little. That was all.

She drew a big noon-day sun in the sky over Beau and Fjord, and then, peeking out from behind it, she drew the silhouette of the Traveler’s hood. She knew Artie would notice that the connection between them was blocked, or broken, or whatever. He’d come looking for her. She knew he would.

Soon.

Jester closed her sketchbook and set it aside. She didn’t have Caleb’s flawless sense of time, but that had probably killed off forty-five minutes, at least. Another lonely, boring hour of keeping watch stretched out in front of her. Just thinking about it made her feel a little sleepy.

But she wouldn’t fall asleep. Not just to make sure she and Caleb were safe, but because Caleb would give her _so much shit_ if he woke up and found her napping.

...

Caleb slept like a rock for almost two more hours. Jester didn’t wake him up; she was pretty sure he was more hurt than he’d been letting on. When he finally stirred, she heard him shift and mumble “Jester?” He turned over on his side to face her.

“Caleb!” she exclaimed in a stage-whisper. She gestured around her. “Look at all the cool shit I found in my bag!”

Caleb raised an eyebrow. All around them were heaps and heaps of stuff that she had extracted from her magic haversack. “Wow,” he said. “Anything useful?”

“Yeah!” she said. “I mean, no swords or anything, but I found another dagger, so you can have two!” She set it down in front of Caleb. “And then I have all these weird pelts? I don’t even remember where we got them! We totally could’ve used them to sleep on when we were camping outside in the snow! And I have so much jewelry, oh my gosh, I could wear two rings on each finger and still have leftovers. Oh!” Not speaking to anyone for three hours had left her a little conversation-starved. “I totally forgot too, that when we left Vess’s tower in Rexxentrum, I took all these fucking cookies!” There were eight of them left, after the two she’d already eaten, folded up in a grease-stained piece of paper. “They’re a little dry, but they’re still really good!”

Caleb stared fixedly at the cookies, and she could tell by the expression on his face that he was calculating exactly how many weeks old they were. Then he shook his head and creakily sat up from the floor. “Screw it,” he said, thrusting his hand out. “They _do_ look good.”

She handed him two cookies and took another one for herself, and the two of them sat huddled there on the cold stone floor and ate with relish. She saw Caleb’s thumb draw along his fingertips, almost reflexively, trying to produce flame, but nothing happened. “Yeah, still nothing for me, either,” Jester said.

For a second, Caleb’s expression tightened with worry, but he swallowed his bite of cookie and seemed to intentionally gather his spirits. “Well, it’s daylight now, yeah?” he asked. He nodded toward the hole in the wall across the room, which was now brightly illuminated with sunlight. “I’m feeling a bit better. Maybe we should try looking outside to see if we can gather our bearings a little.”

“Yeah, that’s a good idea,” Jester said. “And, uh—” She pointed toward the other side of the room. “That’s the pee corner, by the way.”

Caleb’s lips twitched. “You read my mind,” he said, and lurched to his feet to go use it.

The floor in front of the hole in the wall had accumulated a few inches of snow over the last few hours, and when the two of them approached the wall with their paltry non-magical weapons in hand, they found the lower third of the barrel-sized hole blocked by piled snow. “That’s good, that makes it harder for things to get in,” Caleb said. “And a bit trickier for us to get out, but—”

Jester ducked down and looked out of the top half of the hole. The morning sky was gray and cloudy, and the only thing in sight was the same boring snowy wilderness that they’d been staring at over the last few days of traveling.

Then she saw a strange flicker of light on the horizon. “Did you see that?” Jester asked. “It looked like lightning.”

Caleb squeezed in alongside her and looked out. Another flicker of light touched down a moment later. “It looks like some kind of storm,” he said. “The clouds are darker over there.”

“Is it coming toward us, or moving away?”

Caleb craned his neck to get a better look at the motion of the clouds. “Toward us, unfortunately.”

“Oh, man,” Jester said. “Maybe we should just run outside real quick, before it gets closer, and see if our magic works out in the snow.”

Caleb gave a short exhale through his nose. “I really want to try that, too,” he said. “But I know it’s a bad idea. Limping around like this, I’d be very easy prey.”

“I can do it,” Jester said. “I’ve got my axe and my shield. I could just run out there and try to send a message to Caduceus, so we can find out what happened.”

They looked at each other, and Jester could tell Caleb was torn. “How about we keep watch for, like, ten minutes?” Jester said. “And if we don’t see anything moving, then I’ll just run out, try the spell, and come right back in.”

Caleb relented. “Okay.”

So for nine very boring minutes, the two of them leaned against the broken wall and stared outside, looking for movement in the landscape. The flickers of light on the horizon were growing more and more frequent, and in the gaps between clouds, the gray sky was starting to turn an ill-looking pinky-green. “I should probably go now, before the storm gets any closer,” Jester said.

“Thirty-six more seconds.”

Jester rolled her eyes. _“Cay-leb._ ”

“Yeah, okay,” he said. “But be very quiet and don’t walk out too far, all right?”

Jester gathered up her shield and axe and carefully climbed out of the hole in the wall. While a frigid breeze had been blowing through the hole and into their faces for the last ten minutes, it felt _much_ colder when the breeze was unimpeded and hitting her body all over. She shivered and looked around.

She didn’t recognize the exterior of the ruin they were in; it was just a nondescript, snow-covered lump of stone, squatting in the middle of the frozen landscape. Their chamber was the only visible structure. Jester took a few cautious steps away from the exterior wall, making her way into the open snowy field, and with a feeling of trepidation she tucked her axe under her arm and made the hand motion to cast Sending.

Nothing happened.

Frustration burned in the back of her throat. “Come on, Artie,” she murmured, and took a few more steps forward. The wind picked up as she got further away from the structure, numbing her lips, throwing gritty flakes of ice in her eyes, making her blink rapidly. The sound of the wind was louder out here, too, as the storm drew closer. There was an eerie shifting pitch to it, dipping low and high, and she closed her eyes and tried to block the sound out of her head. She needed to focus. She needed to concentrate. She reached out in her mind for the Traveler’s magic again, and—

 _“Jester!”_ Caleb shouted. The sound almost got swallowed by a lilting shift in the wind’s pitch; Jester opened her eyes and turned to look at the ruin.

Her heart froze in her chest. Because there, standing between her and the wall of the ruin, was a wolf—his silver fur matted and mangy, the indentation of his ribs visible, his jaws hanging open as he stared directly at her. She was at least thirty feet from the ruin—shit, she didn’t remember walking _that_ far—and in that moment she felt acutely aware of every ache, pain, and weakness still present in her only partially healed body.

Fuck. _Fuck._ What should she do? The wolf was obviously starving, and that meant it was probably weaker than normal—could she take it down herself? But what if it had a pack coming up behind it, ready to join in? She shouldn’t risk it—she should get back into the ruin. If she could get inside, they could drag something in front of the hole and seal it up.

If she could just somehow get around it—

With a hoarse growl, the wolf leapt forward in the snow, much faster than she was expecting. On adrenaline-fueled instinct she swung up her shield, and it crashed directly into her, its jaws scraping grotesquely against the metal. The force of impact didn’t knock her down, but it made her feet skid backwards in the snow, and she shoved forward with the shield, trying push it back. The wolf’s head snapped around the edge of her shield, a blur of sharp teeth and starving eyes, and then—

Pain exploded up Jester’s arm. The wolf’s jaws bit down on it savagely, and then it tore its head backward with almost enough force to knock the shield out of her hand. _“Fuck,”_ she spat. “Let _go!_ _”_

She swung her axe back with all her strength and slammed it into the wolf’s bony ribs. The wolf let out a squeal of pain, louder than she was expecting, and its jaws loosened just enough that she was able to yank herself free of its bite. With a flicker of angry triumph, she pulled backward on the axe’s handle so she could hit it again.

Instead the handle slipped right out of her hand. The wolf reared up on its hind legs for a second, its gray body twisting and contorting, and she saw that the axe was still embedded in its body, wedged and stuck between two of its protruding ribs. “Oh shit,” she said.

 _“Jester!”_ Caleb shouted again.

Well, the wolf was certainly distracted now. Jester took off at a sprint toward the wall, dodging around the wolf’s bucking, writhing body. “Move, move!” she yelled at Caleb, and when his face disappeared from the hole into the room she dove through it, tumbling down onto the ground in a painful heap, her shield hitting the stone floor with a thunderous _clang._

She scrambled up and shoved her shield toward Caleb. “Hold that against the hole so it can’t get in!” she said. “I’m going to try and drag something over to block it!”

Caleb took her shield and slammed it against the hole in the wall. After a second, she heard another thunderous _clang—_ the wolf had charged straight into the shield, and Caleb almost stumbled backward from the impact.

Oh _shit._ Jester glanced around wildly for a big piece of stone or rubble, and caught sight of what looked like a tall chunk of broken pillar lying on its side on the ground. She grimaced at the size of it, squatted down, and tried to lift it up.

She got it up about half a foot before a flash of white-hot pain reminded her how fucked-up her spine still was. “Fuck fuck _fuck_ ,” Jester chanted to herself, trying to lift through it. If she could just get the pillar upright, she could shove it across the floor on its flat end. She heard another _clang_ as the wolf bashed into her shield again, and Caleb grunted something harsh in Zemnian. Jester’s spine screamed with protest as she lifted the pillar up higher, its center of weight shifting, so close to making it upright that she could feel gravity start to grab it. God, she wished Yasha were here to help her.

Then the pillar tipped onto its base, and the sudden lightness made Jester’s spine sing with relief. Jester braced her shoulder against the pillar and started shoving it toward the wall. “Hold the shield there, I’ll try to pin it to the wall with this!” she shouted.

Caleb, red-faced with strain, braced his full body against the shield as the wolf howled and banged into it twice, three times, four times. When Jester was close enough, Caleb grimaced and angled his body away, and with a cry of frustrated exertion Jester shoved the pillar forward and wedged it against the hole.

Her metal shield caught against the wall and stuck there, pinned up against the hole by the pillar’s heavy weight. Caleb snatched his hands away just before they got pinched, and then he leaned down and helped her shove the pillar as flush against the wall as it would go. They both held their breath for the wolf’s next charge; it came seconds later, a vicious _crash_ that made the shield rattle alarmingly against the stone.

But it held. Another _crash_ —and another—and another—and then the wolf let out an outraged howl, laced through with obvious pain. Jester heard the scrabble of its paws in the snow, and then a long, uneasy silence.

Caleb turned to Jester. He was still red-faced from exertion, his expression tight with stress. For a second, he didn’t say anything—and then he moved forward, clasping Jester into a tight hug.

“Oh!” Jester said. She couldn’t remember Caleb ever actually reaching out and hugging her first.

Caleb said, fervently, “I would _very much like it_ if you didn’t die.”

Jester’s imagination reflexively put the picture in her head: the wolf tearing her apart, leaving her mangled, bloody body in the snow; and Caleb, all alone in Eiselcross, with no magic or healing potions to save her. “I’m sorry,” Jester said, hugging him back just as tight. “I didn’t think I had walked out that far. I just...I wanted that spell to work so bad.”

“I know,” Caleb said.

Jester pressed her face into the cloth of Caleb’s scarf. It was weird how she always forgot how tall he was until she was standing really close to him. And even though he always joked about what a weakling he was, she really liked the way his leanness felt when she wrapped her arms around him. It made her feel like she could get a really good grip.

Outside the chamber, the eerie dipping pitch of the wind was growing louder. “Well,” Caleb said. “I think we’re going to be stuck inside for the time being. That storm is almost on top of us, and the wolf just ran away with our one weapon of any use.”

“Aw, _man_ ,” Jester said, her voice muffled by Caleb’s scarf. “I really liked that axe.”

She heard Caleb’s huff of amusement, and then one of his hands rubbed a small, tentative circle against her back. And—as bad as everything was, she liked that feeling _so much_ that for a few seconds her entire body went warm, from her toes to the tips of her horns. Caleb was always so nice to her—doing things to help her, talking to her when she was sad—but it was always niceness from a distance. He was usually too shy to be nice up close like this.

If she really _had_ to be stuck here in stupid Eiselcross, she was a teeny, tiny bit glad that it was Caleb she had gotten stuck with.

...

The storm arrived five minutes later. The eerie, lilting pitch of the wind turned into a full-throated howl; snow particles started blowing hard through every crack and crevice in the ruin’s broken walls. There were more of those cracks than Jester realized, and soon she and Caleb were covered in a fine dusting of snow as they huddled on the floor behind their barricade of rubble.

Caleb had just finished wrapping a bandage around the bite on Jester’s arm. Once the adrenaline from her fight with the wolf wore off, Jester found herself aching almost as badly as she had when she first woke up. The cold was starting to bother her more, too: the wind whistling through the cracks in the walls had made the inside temperature drop. Caleb and Jester draped the pelts from Jester’s haversack over their legs, and when Caleb picked up the hand-warmer again, he held onto one end of the rod and offered her the other half. She scooted over next to him and put her hands on it, too. “I miss the tower,” Jester said mournfully.

“I miss the dome,” Caleb said. “Hell, I miss just having a campfire.”

“I miss hot cocoa,” Jester said. “And fireplaces. And sleeping in a big bed full of cats.”

The word _cat_ seemed to stir something in Caleb’s mind: he let go of the hand-warmer and made the gesture to summon Frumpkin, a quiet snap and a point of his finger. Nothing happened. Caleb ducked his head and took hold of the hand-warmer again.

“I miss Frumpkin,” he admitted quietly.

“Are you sure you don’t want to hold Sprinkle for a while?” Jester asked. She had slipped a chunk of dry cookie into the pocket of her armor a few minutes ago, and she could still feel the faint vibration of Sprinkle chewing.

“I’m pretty sure he would just bite me until I gave him back to you,” Caleb said. “And honestly, I don’t have a lot of vitality left to lose at this point.”

They really were both beat to shit and in desperate need of a night’s rest. “At least now we can sleep at the same time, since we don’t have to keep watch,” Jester said. “I was so bored when you were asleep.”

“Oh,” Caleb said, remembering. He rubbed his hand against his face. “I didn’t think to check. Did you give me the monocle and goatee after all?”

 _“No,”_ Jester said, although she’d thought about doing it several times.

Caleb rubbed his face more, like he didn’t believe her, then stopped with a hint of a smile. “Maybe if we go to sleep now, the storm will have passed by the time we wake up,” he said.

“That’s a good idea,” Jester said. She looked down at the hand-warmer they were both holding. “Um, it might be kind of awkward, but do you think we could still share this?”

The metal rod was about three feet long, so they laid out the pelts from Jester’s bag into two lumpy beds side by side, so they could each take half of the hand-warmer. It was a little awkward to find a comfortable position to sleep in, as Jester’s back and arm hurt bitterly in every configuration she tried, but eventually the two of them settled down into shivering, snow-dusted lumps on the ground.

Jester expected to fall asleep quickly, the same way she had when they first arrived. But the chamber hadn’t been as cold before, and the fresh pulsing of pain in her arm kept stirring her out of sleepiness. Next to her, Caleb’s breathing hadn’t yet fallen into that raspiness that meant he was sleeping, and he kept shifting his half of the hand-warmer around, like he was trying to drag more heat out of it.

“Caleb?” she whispered after a few minutes.

“Yeah?”

“Are you really cold?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you think we should just”—Jester almost, _almost_ said “shnuggle,” but she managed to reel the word away from her tongue just in time—“sleep closer together so we warm each other up? I did it with Caduceus when we camped outside, and it helped a lot.”

Caleb was silent for a little longer than she expected. Then he audibly exhaled. “Yeah, okay,” he said.

Jester felt an unexpected flicker of excitement—she’d been bracing herself for him to say _no_. “Okay,” she said. “Um, well, I have to sleep on my side since my arm’s all fucked up, so why don’t I hold on to you, and you hold on to the hand-warmer?”

It was even more awkward than before, as the two of them shifted and shuffled and changed position on the lumpy pelts. But when Caleb’s back was tucked up against Jester’s front, it sent a frisson through her that was so happy and warm that it was worth all the awkwardness. She carefully settled her injured arm over Caleb’s waist. “Is this okay?” she said.

She couldn’t see his face, but she saw him adjust the hand-warmer in his arms, hugging it to his chest. “I feel a bit like a lopsided sandwich,” Caleb said. “But yeah. Is it okay for you?”

“Yeah,” Jester said, and even though it hurt her arm, she gave his waist the littlest, tiniest squeeze, just because she could. “I feel much warmer already.”

The two of them settled back into silence. Jester _did_ feel warmer, both inside and out, but she also felt excited enough that sleep seemed even further away from her than it was before. It had been nice when she and Caduceus shnuggled up under his cloak for warmth, but this felt nice in a totally different way. For so long, whenever Jester hugged Caleb, his body would go stiff with surprise, and he’d stammer and pull away after a few seconds, like he didn’t really like it. But now she was holding him close, and he was letting her, and it didn’t feel like he wanted to pull away at all. His weight was even leaning back into her a little bit, a warm line of pressure from her sternum to her stomach.

It was nice.

 _He_ was nice.

After a few minutes, Jester’s excited heart finally started to mellow, and she heard Caleb’s breathing settle into the familiar cadence of sleep. She had definitely warmed him up, too. She closed her eyes, hugged him just a little bit tighter, and waited with happy expectation for sleep to carry her away.

...

“Jester?”

Jester opened her eyes. The room around her was dark, and her front was very cold, because Caleb was no longer in her arms. “Caleb?” she mumbled, her voice crackly with sleep.

Caleb was kneeling down next to her on the pelts where he’d been sleeping. For a moment, she felt a wash of deja vu, remembering waking up to the sight of his face hovering over hers yesterday. But unlike yesterday, his face wasn’t concerned now—it was excited. “I’m sorry to wake you up,” Caleb said, “but could you take a look at this, please?”

He was holding something in his hand. She squinted at it. It looked, confusingly, like a dick—one of the clay dicks she had made for TravelerCon. She took it from Caleb and stared at it with a furrowed brow.

“I was over using the, uh, pee corner,” Caleb said, “when I saw a flash of green light against the wall. And when I turned around, I saw this sitting in the middle of the chamber. Look at the base.”

Jester rotated it in her hand so she was looking at the flat base of the ball sack. There, etched in tiny but distinct letters, she saw:

_TRYING MY BEST. STAY PUT._

She gasped. “Artie!” she exclaimed, looking up at Caleb. “He knows we’re here! He’s trying to get to us!”

“It certainly seems like it, doesn’t it?” Caleb said. He was smiling more broadly than Jester had seen in a while. “Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I was this excited to see a dick.”

Jester laughed, and then with a feeling of throwing caution to the wind, she sat up and threw her arms around Caleb. With less hesitation than she expected, she felt Caleb’s arm fit itself snugly around her back and pull her close. “Oh, I _knew_ he would notice I was missing,” she said happily.

“Of course he would,” Caleb said. “You’re his favorite, after all.”

“Oh!” Jester startled and pulled back. “I need to pack up all my shit! What if we only have a tiny window of time to get out?”

She started shoveling everything back into her haversack, including the pelts they had slept on. The room wasn’t quite as cold as it had been before, although the storm outside hadn’t fully subsided. “How long did we sleep?” she asked Caleb.

“About nine hours,” he said. “How do you feel?”

She paused. She had gotten up and started repacking without even thinking about how much pain she’d been in before. “Like, _way_ better,” she said, giving her back an experimental little shimmy. “How about you?”

“You know, I think I’ll pull through.”

The excitement that propelled Jester to pack up so fast slowly dwindled as ten minutes, fifteen minutes, twenty minutes passed. “I kind of wish he’d carved a time estimate into this thing,” she said, wiggling the clay dick. “I’m going to feel pretty stupid if it takes him, like, a week.”

“Well, while we’re waiting,” Caleb said, “I thought I might use the driftglobe and throw up some light, so I can read.”

“Okay,” Jester said, perking up. “I could do some drawing in my sketchbook.”

The driftglobe’s magic still worked: it lit up blindingly until Caleb threw his scarf over it to dim it. They sat with their backs to it and hunched over their respective books. Caleb was reading from what looked like Halas’s old spellbook. Jester glanced over at the pages of arcane equations and wrinkled her nose. “Can you still read those if your magic isn’t working?” she asked.

“Of course,” he said. “I mean, it’s a bit like reading a knitting pattern when you don’t have any yarn. You feel a little foolish, but you can still see the shape of what’s supposed to be there.”

Jester turned to a fresh page in her sketchbook, but her pencil hesitated again over the paper. There was so much she could draw about the last sixteen-or-so hours, but all of it involved Caleb. It felt weird to draw the things they’d done with him sitting right next to her. She set the pencil down and started flipping backward through the pages instead, looking at her old drawings. It made her heart hurt a bit to see all the pictures of the Mighty Nein, when she still didn’t know if they were safe. But they had to be safe, right? Surely Artie would have carved the news into the dick if they had all died horribly.

She flipped back to the drawing of her and Caleb sitting on the couch together, reading _The Cat Prince_ inside Caleb’s room. Jester felt a faint, happy heat rise up in her cheeks at the sight of it. She had captured Caleb’s likeness very well that night—the way he had looked almost happy. He really _had_ been happy to share that book with her, the one his mother had read to him when he was little. That memory was precious to him, Jester knew, and he had trusted her with it. He was trusting her with so much more, these days.

Then Jester’s eyes caught on a detail in the drawing she’d forgotten about. She had sketched out the broad strokes of Caleb’s bedroom, with its blank walls and lack of decoration, and it had looked so boring that she started filling in some decorations for him. “Hey Caleb,” she said.

“Hmm?”

“The next time we go to the tower, can I decorate your room for you?”

Caleb looked up from his book, his brow furrowed. “Why?”

“Because it’s boring as shit,” Jester said. “You don’t have any decorations on the walls.”

“I don’t really need them,” Caleb said. “I have the rest of the tower to enjoy.”

“Yeah, but—” Jester hesitated. “That’s all stuff _you_ made. It’s different when someone else makes something for you, you know? I really like the room you made me, and part of it is because...I know you cared enough about me to know everything that I liked.”

She saw Caleb’s furrowed brow soften. “You should have that too,” Jester said. “You should be happy when you look around your room, the same way we are.”

His expression turned wry. “Well,” he said. “Happiness has never exactly been in my wheelhouse.”

It was true, but it made Jester a little sad to hear him say it. “I know,” she said. “But it doesn’t hurt to try. And I already have a lot of _really_ good ideas for your room.”

He lifted an eyebrow. “I mean,” Jester hastened to add, “it would be a _collaboration_ , of course. I wouldn’t just draw dicks all over the wall. Unless that’s what you wanted.”

Caleb looked thoughtful. “I could see a few sprinkled here and there for flavor.”

Jester felt a rush of excitement. That wasn’t exactly a _yes_ , but it sounded close. “Do you want to hear my ideas?”

Caleb glanced down at the spellbook in his lap, then folded the cover shut. “Okay,” he said, setting it aside. He angled his body slightly towards her. “What have you got?”

Jester scooted over so their shoulders were squashed together and balanced her sketchbook in between their laps. “Okay, first,” she said, pointing to the sketch she’d made of Caleb’s fireplace, “everyone has a stained glass picture over their fireplace, so you should have one too. _Obviously,_ it should be a portrait of Frumpkin.”

“Obviously?”

“Yes,” Jester said unyieldingly. “He’s your very favorite, after all.”

“That’s true,” Caleb said. His voice went musing. “You know, perhaps I’ve offended him by not giving him proper pride of place in my room.”

“You definitely have,” Jester said. “Okay, and then!” She pointed at the roughly sketched lines of Caleb’s back wall. “All around the room, you have normal wooden baseboards, but _instead_ , you should make the wood look like a lot of silhouetted cats with their tails in the air! You know, in different positions, so it looks like shadows of cats are running, and jumping, and dancing in a big circle all around your room!”

She darkened the shapes with her pencil: a chain of merrymaking cats dancing along the back wall. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the corner of Caleb’s mouth lift. “I see,” he said.

“And _then_ ,” Jester said, emboldened, “this next one is just spit-balling, and you’d have to design it yourself because I don’t understand your magic equations or whatever, but you should do like the Aeorians did here!” She nodded at the walls around them, covered in decorative glyphs. “Your wallpaper should be, like, a fancy, decorative version of the equations you used in your Transmogrify spell—the one that brought Veth back, you know? That way every time you look around, you’ll remember how you and Essek and Veth all figured it out together, and how you made Veth so happy. _And_ —” She inhaled, almost out of breath. “Since you like fire so much, maybe you could make the symbols glow and flicker, like they’re they’re being lit by firelight! And then little bits of smoke can curl off some of the symbols, from the edges.” She traced curlicues on the sketch with her pencil. “Like, it would be very subtle, but very cool, you know?”

She had gotten so carried away with gesticulating at her sketch that she hadn’t looked at Caleb’s reaction. She glanced up and stopped short. Caleb wasn’t looking at the sketch anymore—he was looking at her, with an expression on his face she couldn’t quite decipher. It was soft—softer than she could ever remember seeing—but there was also something pained about it. The sight of the pain made her falter. “Do you not like it?” she asked. “Is it too over the top?”

His lips pressed together tightly, and then their edges ticked up into a genuine smile. “It’s perfect,” he said quietly. “Precisely the kind of memory I’d want to be reminded of. You know me very well, Jester.”

Another warm, happy frisson bubbled through her. “Well, yeah,” she said, giving his shoulder a little bump with hers. “I like you a lot.”

His face reddened, and while the smile didn’t drop from his mouth, he broke eye contact, looking down at the sketchbook between him. He lightly touched the page, tracing the penciled lines of _The Cat Prince_ that Jester had drawn in cartoon-Caleb’s hands. “It’s true that Frumpkin is my favorite,” he said. “But you’re...you’re very high on the list.”

Jester’s heart skipped a beat. “Really?”

He nodded, still not looking up. The tip of his ear had turned almost as ruddy as his hair. “Well, who else is in front of me?” Jester demanded. “Give me names! I’ll take them out!”

Caleb laughed, low but genuine, and his eyes flicked up to meet hers. And there wasn’t any pain on his face anymore, just a smile, so fond and nice and close to hers that Jester’s head went a little fuzzy. She loved making Caleb smile. She loved making him laugh.

She loved—

Jester leaned in and kissed Caleb’s smiling mouth. She didn’t do it on purpose; it was like the happiness in his expression was so strong that it pulled her face in like a magnet. She felt the shape of his smile vanish as their lips met, as their mouths fit together with a soft pressure that sent tingling waves of heat up Jester’s spine. Oh, it was even better than Jester imagined it would be— _her_ first kiss, the first one _she_ gave. She had always been nervous about it. She didn’t know it could be so easy: that you could just like someone so much that gravity pulled you together, without any worry or thought.

Their lips parted. Jester pulled back and opened her eyes to look at Caleb. 

He looked stunned. Not, like, in a funny way, or a cute way: there was a crease on his brow, and tight lines on his forehead, and that horrible look of _pain_ that she thought had left his smile. Her heart sank like a freezing stone in her chest. He hadn’t liked it. He hadn’t wanted it. “You didn’t want me to do that,” Jester said faintly, her head spinning sickly.

She started to pull away from him, and Caleb’s hand lifted from the page of her sketchbook and clasped hers, tight. “I _did_ want you to do that,” Caleb said. “I just...thought I’d been hiding it better.” The edges of his mouth ticked up for a pained moment. “You really do know me too well.”

Jester’s heart was a confused tangle in her chest, and she felt a little lump start to rise in her throat. “If you wanted me to do it, then why do you look so sad?” Jester asked.

His other hand came up to cover hers, warm and tight. “Because I’m...” He hesitated. “Because it is very important to me that your life is a happy one. And...” He exhaled raggedly. “Well, I’m a grim prospect on that front, aren’t I?”

Now Jester’s brow was furrowing. “What are you talking about?”

“I am...not a catch,” Caleb said. “I’m damaged, and prideful, and I have—” His voice caught painfully in his throat. “I have blood on my hands that I can never wash away.”

Jester stared at him. “Yeah,” she said. “I know. And I _really like you_.”

Caleb ducked his head, a look almost like frustration passing over his face. “You’re so _stupid_ , Caleb,” Jester said, her voice rising a little. “All you ever _do_ all day is love people, and help them, and try to make things better. Why am I not supposed to love you back?”

He froze. For a second, Jester didn’t know why—and then she replayed her last angry sentence in her head and heard the telltale word.

 _Love_.

Well, she _did_ love him. And she liked him, too. They were two different things, and she felt them both. “If you don’t want me to kiss you, that’s fine,” Jester said vehemently. “But if you _do_ want me to, you should let me, ‘cuz I liked it a lot.”

For a long, terrible moment, he was silent. And then she heard the quiet huff of his laughter—genuine, not mirthless. “As easy as that?” he asked, addressing the floor more than her.

“Yeah.”

He lifted his head to look at her. His face was red, and his eyes looked a little red, too, but the expression on his face was much better than the one he’d had before. This one was soft, and pained, and fond, and amused. She could handle a little bit of all of those things, if they were all mixed up in one.

He bit down momentarily on his lower lip and squeezed her hand. “There’s no one in front of you on the list,” he said. “It’s Frumpkin, then you. You’re a solid number two.”

Jester’s tangled heart started to loosen in her chest with relief. He was teasing her again. Or, at least, he _better_ be teasing her. _“Cay-leb,”_ Jester complained, and he let go of her hand, reaching up to cup her cheek. He drew their lips together with magnetic ease, a second kiss with the same gentle pressure as the first. And after a second Jester ruined it by smiling, her lips pulling free as happy warmth filled her from head to toe. He really did want it.

He really did like her.

“I’m sorry,” came a deep, mellifluous voice. “Am I interrupting something?” 

Jester and Caleb both abruptly jerked apart. Because there, standing in front of them with a mixture of amusement and annoyance on his face, was Artagan.

“Artie!” Jester exclaimed, leaping to her feet. She was too relieved to feel embarrassed—she threw her arms around him. “You found us!”

“Not like you made it easy,” Artagan said, but there was a tolerant permissiveness underneath his words. “You and your friends have a knack for finding places that are irritatingly intolerant to elevated beings like myself.”

Jester pulled back from him, and then, to her utter surprise, _Caleb_ stood up and gave Artagan a firm hug. “Very good to see you, Red,” he said.

“Uh,” Artagan said, looking flummoxed. “Okay?”

“Do you know what happened to our friends?” Jester asked eagerly.

“They’re in Nicodranas, being _extremely_ unhelpful about where in this snowy hellscape I should be looking for you,” Artagan said. “But let’s not keeping them waiting, eh? I had to tunnel in to find you, metaphysically speaking, and I don’t want to be stuck here if that tunnel collapses.”

Next to her, Jester saw a small orange glow: Caleb was holding a small flame in the palm of his hand. “Oh, that feels nice,” Caleb said, shoulders slumping with relief.

Jester grabbed her things from the floor and threaded her arm through Caleb’s, careful to avoid the fire. “Word of Recall?” she asked Artagan.

His mouth curved into a knowing smile. “Express delivery for two, right back to your bedroom.”

Now _he_ was teasing her. She stuck her tongue out at him, then opened her mouth to say the incantation. And this time, when the sound vibrated in her throat, she could _feel_ it: magic, inside her and around her. Oh God, would she never take it for granted again.

Then she completed the phrase, and she felt a weightless _swoop_ in her stomach. Darkness flashed in front of her eyes. Then—

Bright walls, covered in myriad little drawings. Sunlight coming through a window. A canopy bed, full bookshelves, and lots of little statues and sculptures, lovingly decorating every flat surface. The first shrine to the Traveler that ever existed.

Home.

Jester felt a sudden purring weight drape over her shoulders. “Frumpkin!” she exclaimed, as the fey cat’s sweet, furry head started rubbing against her cheek. She started scritching behind his ears. She grinned at Caleb. “Aw, you gave him to me first!”

“You were the one to get us out of there,” Caleb said, his hand joining hers in petting Frumpkin’s head. “You deserve the first round of kitty biscuits.”

She felt Frumpkin’s paws start kneading at her shoulder. “Oh, I love you, Frumpkin,” Jester said, nuzzling him. “Even if you are my rival for Caleb’s love.”

Caleb’s face flushed a startling shade of red. Wow, it was going to be really easy to make him blush, going forward. Literally all she had to do was say the word _love_. “That’s going to, uh, take some getting used to,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck.

They smiled at each other. A wonderful relief filled Jester from head to toe: knowing she was home, and that their friends were nearby. There was only one thing left that was weighing on her mind.

“This isn’t going to be weird, is it?” she asked. “When we’re back around everyone in the group?

Caleb tilted his head thoughtfully. “It might be a little weird,” he allowed.

“But we’re not going to pretend like it didn’t happen?”

“I don’t see how we could,” Caleb said. “As soon as they see my new bedroom in the tower, it’s going to be very obvious that you care for me.”

Jester felt a happy flush rise up in her cheeks. Caleb seemed to notice it, too: he reached up and cupped her face, running his thumb along the apple of her cheek. “Did I just make _you_ blush?” he asked, sounding surprised.

“No,” Jester said. “Shut up.”

“Interesting,” Caleb said. “That evens the playing field a bit, doesn’t it?”

Jester tried to make a mean face at him, but her smile betrayed her. The feeling of his thumb gently stroking her cheek was too nice to let her frown.

"I’ll follow your lead,” Caleb said. His voice was soft. "If there's one thing today has taught me, it's that you have enough confidence for the both of us."


End file.
